I'm continuing my reporting on the next installment from Conservative Estimate, the recently founded website that is devoted to demolishing Conservatism.
Yesterday, Alfred George showed that the Myth of Competition is a deeply ingrained prejudice, that competition has taken on a positive aura, and that it is actually a weakness rather than a strength.
Today, he discusses how competition narrows our faculties and causes us to perform at sub-par levels.
We can hop the orange thingy for a chat . . .
Mr. George begins by noting that we sometimes have to engage in competitive activities when others challenge us. This hardly justifies, however, the cult of competition that dominates modern society. Sometimes we need to compete,
[b]ut to pretend that all, or even most, of life is like that is simply to falsify reality. Unless you live in a war zone, not even the harshest of environments lacks interludes during which we can let our thoughts run free, let our senses drink in the surroundings, let our bodies free to dance or sing or run.
Believing the the Myth of Competition stunts the open-ended exercise of our most inspirational and stimulating abilities—and in doing so cramps the freedom required to be a Creator.
Then Mr. George goes on to explain why overindulging in competition lowers the level of our functioning:
When we live all the time in a responsive mode, we begin to function like machines. We don’t ask any longer whether the situation facing us is a combat situation, because we cannot be satisfied until we have a challenge to treat like a competition. We view every life task as a struggle. Are we going to be able to fix that broken toilet or is it going to “beat” us?
When life doesn’t deliver up anything to respond to, we generate more situations that can be treated as competitions, either directly between us and other individuals, or vicariously between two other competitors, one of which we identify with. This is the appeal of all spectator sports.
This is yet another limitation of our abilities, in this case, of our creative powers. Of all the things we could create, we choose to create more competitions, because we have become comfortable with the limits of competition. We become co-creators of own own limitations, unwitting participants in our own low-level functioning.
You can read the whole post
here.
Tomorrow Mr. George will show that competition actually breeds vices, and that it is not, as is commonly believed, a fundamental fact of life.
I'll be reporting back each day as a new installment appears.